Persistent Mullerian duct syndrome with bilateral abdominal testis: surgical approach and review of the literature.

Objective: We present two cases of persistent Mullerian duct syndrome (PMDS) with bilateral intra-abdominal testes and review the world's literature with special attention to diagnosis and surgical management.

Patients And Methods: Two consecutive cases of PMDS with bilateral intra-abdominal testes from our institution are presented with detailed descriptions of the presentation, physical examination, laboratory profiles, surgical findings, and treatment undertaken. Follow-up at 1 year postoperatively is included.

A semi-automated high-throughput approach to the generation of transposon insertion mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

The generation of a large collection of defined transposon insertion mutants is of general interest to the Caenorhabditis elegans research community and has been supported by the European Union. We describe here a semi-automated high-throughput method for mutant production and screening, using the heterologous transposon Mos1. The procedure allows routine culture of several thousand independent nematode strains in parallel for multiple generations before stereotyped molecular analyses.

Absorbable laparoscopic cigarette sponge.

Objectives: Minor intraoperative bleeding during laparoscopy poses a significant challenge to the minimally invasive urologist. We report on our improvement of the previously reported laparoscopic cigarette sponge with absorbable materials.

Methods: The sponge was constructed from a strip of absorbable gelatin sponge wrapped in oxidized regenerated cellulose and secured with absorbable suture.

Stroma adjacent to metastatic mature teratoma after chemotherapy for testicular germ cell tumors is derived from the same progenitor cells as the teratoma.

Metastatic mature teratoma is often present in postchemotherapy surgical specimens of lymph nodes from patients with pathological stage II or III testicular germ cell tumors. The stromal cells in these lesions have generally been considered "fibrosis" secondary to the chemotherapy and the necrosis it causes, although the frequent cytological atypia of the stromal cells suggests that they may be neoplastic. We studied 25 patients with pathological stage II or III testicular cancer who were treated with platinum-based chemotherapy followed by surgical resection of retroperitoneal lymph nodes that contained metastatic mature teratoma with "fibrosis" to determine the reactive or neoplastic nature of the stromal cells.

Biochemical disease-free survival in patients with a high prostate-specific antigen level (20-100 ng/mL) and clinically localized prostate cancer after radical prostatectomy.

Objective: To examine our experience with radical prostatectomy (RP) in patients with a serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level of > 20 ng/mL (who are sometimes considered poor candidates for RP) to determine the outcome and possible predictors of a favourable outcome.

Patients And Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 79 patients who underwent RP with an initial PSA of 20-100 ng/mL. Biochemical disease-free survival (BDFS) was assessed using the Kaplan-Meier method and predictors of treatment outcome examined by uni- and multivariate analysis.